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Luis Carrero Blanco | |
|---|---|
 Carrero Blanco in 1938 | |
| Prime Minister of Spain | |
| In office 9 June 1973 – 20 December 1973 | |
| Leader | Francisco Franco |
| Deputy | Torcuato Fernández-Miranda |
| Preceded by | Francisco Franco |
| Succeeded by | Torcuato Fernández-Miranda (acting) |
| Deputy Prime Minister of Spain | |
| In office 22 September 1967 – 9 June 1973 | |
| Leader | Francisco Franco |
| Preceded by | Agustín Muñoz Grandes |
| Succeeded by | Torcuato Fernández-Miranda |
| Undersecretary of the Presidency[a] | |
| In office 5 May 1941 – 9 June 1973 | |
| Nominated by | Francisco Franco |
| Preceded by | Valentín Galarza Morante |
| Succeeded by | José María Gamazo |
| Member of theCortes Españolas | |
| In office 16 March 1943 – 24 March 1946 | |
| Nominated by | Francisco Franco |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Luis Carrero Blanco (1904-03-04)4 March 1904 |
| Died | 20 December 1973(1973-12-20) (aged 69) |
| Manner of death | Assassination byexplosive device |
| Resting place | Mingorrubio Cemetery,El Pardo, Madrid |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 5 |
| Signature |  |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |
|
| Branch/service | Spanish Navy |
| Years of service | 1918–1973 |
| Rank | Admiral[b] |
| Battles/wars | |
Admiral-GeneralLuis Carrero Blanco (Spanish pronunciation:[ˈlwiskaˈreɾoˈβlaŋko]; 4 March 1904 – 20 December 1973) was a Spanish Navy officer and politician. A long-time confidant and right-hand man of dictatorFrancisco Franco, Carrero served asPrime Minister of Spain.Upon graduating from the naval academy Carrero Blanco participated in theRif War, and later theSpanish Civil War, in which he supported theRebel faction. He became one of the most prominent figures inFrancoist Spain's power structure and held throughout his career a number of high-ranking offices such as those ofUndersecretary of the Presidency from 1941 to 1967 and Franco'sdeputy from 1967 to 1973. He also was the main drafter behind the 1947Law of Succession to the Headship of the State. Franco handpicked him as his successor in the role ofhead of government, with Carrero thereby taking office in June 1973.
Shortly after he became prime minister,Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid in a streetside bombing on 20 December 1973 by theBasque nationalist groupEuskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) while he was returning fromMass in his car.[2][3]
Luis Carrero Blanco was born on 4 March 1904 in the coastal town ofSantoña, province of Santander, to Camilo Carrero Gutiérrez (1879–1936), a lieutenant colonel in theArmy stationed in nearby Santander, and Ángeles Blanco Abascal (1885–1910) a local woman. He had his early schooling at theColegio Manzanedo [es] in Santoña and in 1918, at the age of 14, he followed the family military tradition by enlisting at theSpanish Naval Academy inSan Fernando, Cádiz.
By 18, he had already achieved the rank of lieutenant, serving aboard thedreadnoughtAlfonso XIII and participated in theRif War from 1924 to 1926. In 1926, he decided to specialise in submarine warfare, and served as lieutenant commander on theB-2 and as commander on theB-5.
In 1929, he married María del Carmen Pichot y Villa (1909–1984) with whom he had five children.[4]
At the outset of theSpanish Civil War, Carrero Blanco was a naval instructor teaching submarine tactics at the Naval Warfare College in Madrid. As a military man of conservative views he knew that he was marked; his brother José had already been detained and subsequently executed and his father died on the day of his arrest. Like many nationalists, he sought refuge first in the Mexican embassy and later that ofFrance, from where he was able to cross the border fromSan Sebastián into France and re-enter on theNationalist side in June 1937.
Carrero Blanco then served in the Nationalist navy first ascorvette captain aboard the destroyerHuesca and later the submarineGeneral Sanjurjo. Following theNationalist victory and subsequent establishment ofGeneralísimo Franco asCaudillo of Spain, Carrero Blanco was appointed Chief of Naval Operations in August 1939.[5]
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In May 1941, Franco appointed Carrero (age 37) as Under-Secretary of the Presidency of the Government, replacingValentín Galarza Morante.[6] Following the1942 Begoña incident, Carrero advised Franco to removeRamón Serrano Suñer from ministerial rank and from the post of president of the Political Junta ofFET y de las JONS, and so Franco did.[7] Carrero was—asJoan Maria Thomàs puts it—"extremely faithful and submissive to El Caudillo", a polar opposite of Suñer, of whom the dictator had become weary despite their family connection.[8]
Carrero Blanco was made Vice-Admiral in 1963 and Admiral in 1966. He was Deputy Prime Minister from 1967 to 1973. By that time Franco, even if he was still then the head of state and concurrent Prime Minister, had already delegated the day-to-day running of the government over to Carrero Blanco himself, owing to the former's old age and illness. The latter excelled in this regard, in terms of carrying Franco's policies and in directing the ministries towards that direction.
Upon the nomination ofJuan Carlos of Bourbon as heir to Franco in the headship of state in 1969, it was believed that an authoritarian monarchy guided by Carrero would guarantee the continuation of Francoism without Franco, an idea underpinned by Franco's own words during the Bourbon's nominating speech:está atado y bien atado ('all is tied down and well tied down').[9]
Carrero reached the peak of his political career on 8 June 1973, when Franco—as envisaged in the 1967Organic Law of the State that separated the functions of head of government from those of head of state—appointed Carrero as Prime Minister.
The supporters of the aforementioned authoritarian monarchic continuation to the Francoist regime (thecontinuista solution) suffered two successive blows in the wake of theassassination of Carrero in 1973, and theoverthrow of the neighbouring Portuguese regime in 1974.[10]
Six months after being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated on 20 December 1973 in Madrid by four members of anETA cell, who carried out a bombing near San Francisco de Borja Church on Calle de Serrano while he returned from daily mass in a SpanishDodge 3700.[11]
In a collective interview justifying the attack, the ETA bombers said:
The execution in itself had an order and some clear objectives. From the beginning of 1951 Carrero Blanco practically occupied the government headquarters. Carrero Blanco symbolized better than anyone else the figure of "pure Francoism" and without totally linking himself to any of the Francoist tendencies, he covertly attempted to push Opus Dei into power. A man without scruples conscientiously mounted his own state within the State: he created a network of informers within the ministries, in the Army, in the Falange, and also in Opus Dei. His police managed to put themselves into all the Francoist apparatus. Thus he made himself the key element of the system and a fundamental piece of the oligarchy's political game. On the other hand, he came to be irreplaceable for his experience and capacity to manoeuvre and because nobody managed as he did to maintain the internal equilibrium of Francoism.
— Julen Agirre,Operation Ogro: The Execution of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco[12]
The assassination enjoyed the tacit approval of many Spaniards, who joked about Carrero being Spain's first astronaut.[13]
In his first speech to the Cortes on 12 February 1974, Carrero Blanco's successor as prime minister,Carlos Arias Navarro, promised liberalizing reforms including the right to form political associations. Though he was denounced by Falangists, the transition had begun.
One of the members of the cell who had assassinated Carrero Blanco was himself assassinated by a car bomb in southern France on 21 December 1978 by a special team organized within the Navy. This group included a member of theHigher Centre of Defense Information secret service, another from the Naval Intelligence Service and the other belonged to theDefense High Command. In addition, it received assistance from a number of right-wing paramilitary groups throughJean-Pierre Cherid (OAS), José María Boccardo (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) and Mario Ricci (Avanguardia Nazionale).[14]
Argala, the codename by which the ETA member was known, was the only one who could identify the source who had handed Carrero Blanco's schedule and itinerary over to ETA. According toLeonidas, a former member of the Spanish Army who participated in the bombing against Argala, "The explosives came from aUS base. I don't remember exactly if it was fromTorrejón orRota, but I do know that the Americans did not know what they would be used for. It was a personal favour for Pedro el Marino" (Pedro Martínez) who provided the explosives.[15] Argala's assassination was claimed by theSpanish Basque Battalion. However, according toLeonidas, "BVE, ATE" (Anti-Terrorismo ETA) or "Triple A" are only labels of convenience that are used by the same group.[16]
Carrero Blanco's funeral, which would be one of Franco's last public appearances, was held the following day at theBasilica of Saint Francis the Great, Madrid and he was buried atMingorrubio Cemetery in the neighbouring municipality ofEl Pardo, where Franco himself would be relocated in 2019.[17] Carrero was posthumously elevated to "Captain general of the Navy" and declared "Duke of Carrero Blanco".[18][19]
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Carrero did not clearly belong to any family within the regime. His ultimate identification was with the work of the Dictator; as such, he can be considered a pure Francoist.[20] Antonio Elorza described the most distinct features of his ideology as beingcounter-revolution,anticommunism andsatanization of Masonry, all according to aconspiracy theory of history,[21] in line with a "degradedAugustinianism".[22]
Also known for hisantisemitic diatribes, by 1941 he saw the state of affairs of a world at war as follows: "Spain, paladin of the Faith in Christ, is again (acting) against the true enemy: Judaism... Because the world, even if it does not look like it, lives in a permanent war of a religious type; it is the struggle of Christianity against Judaism. War to the death, as thefight of good against evil should be."[23]
Carrero, who heldpaternalist views when assessing the Spanish presence in Africa, was hostile to the acceptance of thedecolonisation process.[24] As he declared that theWestern Sahara "had not ever been controlled by the Moroccan Empire", he defended that the territory was "as Spanish as theprovince of Cuenca is".[25]
Openly Germanophile in his articles written for theMundo magazine during the first part ofWorld War II, after the turn in the conflict against theAxis powers in 1943, he modulated his hostile discourse towards theAllied Powers in those pieces; finally, after the defeat of the Axis, he had wholly replaced the message attacking the liberal democracies by a merely anti-Soviet one.[26] A defender of the idea that the victory of the Francoist side in the Civil War had happened "despite" an alleged international conspiracy against the former, years later, in the 1950s, he insisted again: "this is precisely the Spanish problem, Spain wants to implement the Good, and the forces of Evil, unleashed upon the world, try to prevent her from doing it".[27]
He was reportedly among the endorsers of the so-called"Proyecto Islero", an alleged secret plan to develop a nuclear weapon for Spain.[28]
Regarding the future of a post-Franco Spain, Carrero, along withLópez Rodó, envisaged and promoted the idea of an authoritarian monarchy guaranteeing the continuity ofFrancoism.[29]
Carrero Blanco wrote a number of books on the Spanish navy and Spanish naval military history, as well as political treatises onCommunism andFreemasonry (under the pseudonymJuan de la Cosa).
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)| Political offices | ||
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| Preceded by | .svg) President of the Government of Spain 1973 | Succeeded by Torcuato Fernández-Miranda (acting) |
